While we're recommending other works by Le Guin, The Child and the Shadow is near the top of my personal list of Essays That Would Change the World if Only Enough People Would Read Them. It's a deep dive interpretation of a somewhat obscure Hans Christian Andersen story, and her insights about the nature of evil and what it means to grow up shook me and then reshaped my life.
This paragraph is as decent a tl;dr as can exist, but you really should read the whole essay:
> The normal adolescent ceases to project so blithely as the little child did; he realizes that you can't blame everything on the bad guys with the black Stetsons. He begins to take responsibility for his acts and feelings. And with it he often shoulders a terrible load of guilt. He sees his shadow as much
blacker, more wholly evil, than it is. The only way for a youngster to get past the paralyzing self-blame and self-disgust of this stage is really to look at that shadow, to face it, warts and fangs and pimples and claws and all – to accept it as himself – as part of himself. The ugliest part, but not the weakest. For the shadow is the guide. The guide inward and out again; downward and up again; there, as Bilbo the Hobbit said, and back again. The guide of the journey to self-knowledge, to adulthood, to the light.
Someone here quoted Kafka the other day who said you should only read books that sting you, and affect you like a blow to the head.
From your essay:
> Now that is an extraordinarily cruel story. A story about insanity, ending in humiliation and death. Is it a story for children? Yes, it is. It's a story for anybody who's listening.
In a sea of all those fluffy “stories made for kids”, that are just reflecting back to children the kinds of things authors think children want to hear and give a child nothing solid, nothing to grapple with, this is such a relief for me to read.
> I hated it when I was a kid. I hated all the Andersen stories with unhappy endings. That didn't stop me from reading them, and rereading them. Or from remembering them.
What an awesome insight. Pretty much mirrors that Kafka quote.
This paragraph is as decent a tl;dr as can exist, but you really should read the whole essay:
> The normal adolescent ceases to project so blithely as the little child did; he realizes that you can't blame everything on the bad guys with the black Stetsons. He begins to take responsibility for his acts and feelings. And with it he often shoulders a terrible load of guilt. He sees his shadow as much blacker, more wholly evil, than it is. The only way for a youngster to get past the paralyzing self-blame and self-disgust of this stage is really to look at that shadow, to face it, warts and fangs and pimples and claws and all – to accept it as himself – as part of himself. The ugliest part, but not the weakest. For the shadow is the guide. The guide inward and out again; downward and up again; there, as Bilbo the Hobbit said, and back again. The guide of the journey to self-knowledge, to adulthood, to the light.
> "Lucifer" means the one who carries the light.
https://johnirons.com/pdfs/shadowleguin.pdf